Speaking At MADExpo

Over the past few months I have been actively working with both Luis Lavena and Wayne E Seguin to incorporate both TinyTDS and the SQL Server Adapter into the latest release of the Rails Installer for Windows. Like them, I firmly believe that Ruby's success is tightly bound to how well we can bring these tools to the Windows platform. So despite that I have no love for the Windows – I do want to see Ruby succeed and help spread the gospel. To this end, I have been working really hard at making both TinyTDS and the adapter a superb backend for ActiveRecord. In fact today, I just released a 3.1 beta that takes advantage of the new prepared statement support.

To go one step further in helping Ruby, I have decided to speak at a local conference called the Mid Atlantic Developer Expo or just MADExpo. The details for my talk
are below and if you find any of the other talks interesting, I highly advise you to grab a ticket and help me bring the message of Ruby right to the belly of the beast!

Free The Enterprise With Ruby & Master Your Own Domain

On the heals of Luis Lavena's RailsConf talk "Infiltrating Ruby Onto The Enterprise Death Star Using Guerilla Tactics" comes a local and frank talk about the current state of Open Source Software (OSS) participation from Windows developers. Learn what OSS is, what motivates its contributors, and how OSS can make you a stronger developer. Be prepared to fall in love with writing software again!

We will start off with a 101 introduction to both the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails web application framework. You will learn about ActiveRecord, a powerful ORM that maps rich objects to your databases, and the latest components to use it with SQL Server. As a Rails core contributor and author of the SQL Server stack, I will give you a modern insight into both that will allow you to leverage your legacy data with Ruby.

Lastly, I will review the bleeding edge tools being actively created for Windows developers to ease the transition to Ruby, Rails and OSS from a POSIX driven world. Many things have changed. It is time to learn and perform some occupational maintenance.